by David Mikics
Kubrick’s most brilliant stroke was picking Peter Sellers to play Quilty, turning Humbert’s nemesis into a major presence in the film. Kubrick was a fan of Sellers, then a rising comedian and film star, as well as a British citizen, which made him ideal for the movie because of the United Kingdom’s 80 percent rule. Egged on by Kubrick, Sellers injected a manic nervous energy into his role to counterpoint the rather slow-moving Humbert.
Kubrick saw Quilty as a mystery. Quilty’s presence in the story “should give us a kind of ‘Maltese Falcon,’ what’s-going-on type of suspense,” Kubrick wrote to Peter Ustinov, who had become friends with the director during Spartacus. “Every time we catch a glimpse of Quilty we can imagine anything, police, pervert or parent.”47
Kubrick started Sellers rolling by scripting much of the movie’s first scene, the flashback in which Humbert kills Quilty. “I am Spartacus,” Quilty, togaed in a bedsheet, tells Humbert. “Hey, you come to free the slaves or somethin’ ”? Elsewhere he relied heavily on Sellers’s miraculous gift for improvisation. “He was the only actor I knew who could really improvise,” Kubrick said later, adding that Sellers “is receptive to comic ideas most of his contemporaries would think unfunny and meaningless.”48
When we meet Quilty at the beginning of Lolita, Humbert has tracked the villain to his baroque lair and is about to shoot him. This is the end of Humbert’s story: Jimmy Harris claimed it was his idea to put it at the start of the movie, for a noirish touch. In this opening scene, Humbert stares down Quilty’s madcap performance. He gives him a cold appraising look, the look, he thinks, of judgment, as he tells Quilty he’s going to die very soon. But Humbert, unlike Lolita, cannot master a withering stare, and Quilty continues bopping through his nutty shtick. The doomed Quilty has Humbert’s number, allying him with his own perversion (he makes arty porno movies, we learn in the novel): “To attend executions, how would you like that?” he asks Humbert. “Just you there, nobody else. Just watching, watching. You like watching, Captain?”
The enigmatic Quilty that Kubrick and Sellers invented is cool as a cucumber, and hipper than anyone in the room. At the parents and teens dance with his dead cool beatnik sidekick, Vivian Darkbloom, Quilty steals a glance at his watch, and melds this gesture of chic boredom into his dance moves.
Kubrick wrote to Ustinov that “we shall treat psychiatrists with the same irreverence that Mr. Nabokov does in the book,” though Kubrick appreciated Freud, unlike Nabokov, who liked to launch jibes at the “Viennese quack.”49 The director spurred Sellers’s turn as the fussy, Teutonic Dr. Zempf (actually Quilty in disguise), who sits in shadow in Humbert’s house and expresses his therapeutic concern for Lolita. “Acute repression of the libido, of the natural instincts,” is his diagnosis. Sellers’s hand gestures describe an invisible melon (Lolita should be developing a well-rounded personality) as he emits a stiff man-of-the-world chuckle.
Kubrick and Sellers found a model for Quilty’s speech patterns in the jazz impresario Norman Granz; Kubrick even asked Granz to record parts of the Lolita script for Sellers to study. But Quilty also sounds like Kubrick himself, with his skittering, Bronx-inflected style of talk. As the critic Richard Corliss notes, there is a touch of Lenny Bruce too in Quilty. Sellers seems sweaty under the collar, nervous, quick, and defensive, caroming from one prickly verbal stunt to another.50
While working with Sellers on Lolita, Kubrick began his habit of writing down actors’ improvisations and making them part of the next day’s script. (In a Kubrick shoot the script was always being revised day to day.) “If a scene didn’t seem quite right,” Sellers remembered, “we’d read it from the script and pick out the parts which went best. Then we’d sit around a table with a tape recorder and ad-lib on the lines of the passages we’d chosen; in that way we’d get perfectly natural dialogue which could then be scripted and used.”51 In his later movies, too, most notably with Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick would make actors’ improvisations part of the script, rather than using improvised scenes in his final cut.
Encouraged by Kubrick, Sellers seems to be scrawling scurrilous graffiti across the tender love story of Humbert and Lo. Quilty is “always trying something on,” like Sellers himself, says the actor’s biographer Roger Lewis. “His endless re-creations also implicitly criticize the rest of us for being rigid and conventional, for being stuck with who we are.”52
In contrast to the boundary-busting Quilty, Humbert is a square standing in the way of Lo’s teenybopper fun. Kubrick’s Humbert, unlike Nabokov’s, is not a schemer. He doesn’t plot to ensnare Lolita. Instead Kubrick gives us Humbert the squirming sufferer. Mason plays the role with a wincing, put-upon look. His manner, like that of a man who has misplaced his glasses, is sometimes too detached to be truly affecting. But Mason signals genuine pain beneath his stylish, mildly disoriented exterior. Humbert’s cruelty, on abundant display in Nabokov, appears only briefly in the movie, when he reads aloud Charlotte’s helplessly ardent love letter. Here the chortling Mason, unable to stifle himself, lets loose with a guffaw, then a full-throttle whoop. Mason, happy as a cat, shines wickedly too in the bathtub scene that comes on the heels of Charlotte’s death. (Nabokov loved seeing Humbert in the bath with a glass of scotch balanced on his hairy chest.)
The novel’s Humbert is a godlike master of the higher sarcasm, a charming devil eager to get on our good side, like any conniving convict, by showing remorse for his sins. We need to beware of Nabokov’s hero most when he is humble Hum, expressing poignant regret for wrecking Lolita’s childhood. But the barbed tour de force that is Nabokov’s Humbert, with suave acrobatics walking the tightrope of his crimes, remains absent from the movie. Kubrick uses Humbert’s voice-over sparingly, and it is devoid of verbal pirouettes. Whereas the novel makes us revel in Humbert’s prowess with words, in Kubrick’s movie he is often tongue-tied.
Kubrick nearly omits what Nabokov stresses: this is a child rapist we’re dealing with. For the movie’s latter half Humbert is the desperate loser, pinioned by orderlies in a hospital, in a starkly lit, noirish scene, and raving about the disappearance of his stepdaughter. Humbert’s madcap rival Quilty steals the show, courtesy of Sellers’s comic genius—something that doesn’t happen in the novel, where Quilty almost seems a figment of Humbert’s imagination.
If Humbert is Quilty’s straight man, Charlotte Haze, Lolita’s mother, is Humbert’s. Shelley Winters’s Charlotte is juicelessly zaftig. Whiny even when she cha-chas, puffy around the eyes, and vulgar in her pretension to culture, Charlotte seems an unstoppable kitsch express. We dislike this cloying, stupid woman who is so mean-minded toward her daughter, and are relieved when she gets killed.
Winters remarked that she felt lonely on the set, and guessed that Kubrick wanted this response from her, to reinforce Charlotte’s hopelessly pathetic stature. In fact, he was frustrated by her mulish obstinacy on the set. “I think the lady’s gonna have to go,” he mused at one point, but in the end didn’t fire Winters.53 This was the right decision: no one else could have played the Kubrickized Charlotte.
Kubrick reimagined Charlotte just as he did the rest of Nabokov’s characters. In the novel she is a Marlene Dietrich wannabe, less helpless than predatory, unlike Kubrick’s sodden hausfrau. In Kubrick’s movie, Charlotte’s motherly intrusiveness saps any possible sex appeal. Contrast Christiane Harlan Kubrick, who in her song at the end of Paths of Glory is both sexy and kind, fragile and nurturing.
Kubrick, even more than Nabokov, makes Charlotte unbearably clingy. Imagining Charlotte, he must have remembered Ruth the suction cup, the wife who fastened herself to him relentlessly in her effort to become essential to her husband’s work. In Lolita, Humbert gets to discard the burdensome, too-present wife in favor of a young girl, the ideal of his romantic imagination.
The choice between wife and daughter (or quasi-daughter) haunts Kubrick’s work. For decades Kubrick was possessed by but afraid to make Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story (1926), in part because it depicts a
husband who strays from his spouse and is drawn to younger women, including several Lolitaesque nymphets. Christiane Kubrick turned out to be less of a creative partner for Kubrick than his youngest daughter, Vivian, his protégée. Vivian, who appeared briefly as a toddler in 2001, became a director at seventeen, with a documentary about the making of The Shining, and her father urged her to film a novel by Colette, a writer he much admired.54 But by the mid-nineties Vivian had fled from the pressure of her father’s ambitions for her. The Lolita story oddly foreshadows the relation between Kubrick and Vivian—granting, of course, the contrast between Kubrick’s proper paternal love and Humbert’s sexual abuse of Lolita. Lolita finally escapes Humbert and transforms herself into a grown-up he could never have imagined, just as Vivian fled from her father’s love in the 1990s and transplanted herself to Los Angeles and Scientology.
Long before Vivian, Sue Lyon was Kubrick’s daughterly disciple. Adept at following his direction, she delivers a wonder of a Lolita, insolent and insouciant. Her Lo is snooty, a little grubby, absentminded, and self-pleased: her majesty the teen. The ravenous Lo devouring a sandwich, prepared by a pampering Humbert, presages Clockwork’s Alex, another adolescent with a healthy appetite. During the tense argument between father and stepdaughter after the school play, Lyon is a bratty virtuoso of gum-chewing, her eyes shooting darts of disdain.
Lyon can be steely too. (Kubrick wanted his Lolita hard.) When Humbert visits the older Lolita, now pregnant and married, she bluntly rejects him. Here Lyon is coldhearted, nearly oblivious. In the novel Lolita also dismisses Humbert’s last-minute plea for her love, but still calls him “honey,” throwing him a scrap of feeling that is absent from Kubrick’s scene.
The toughness of the pregnant Lolita becomes, four decades later in Eyes Wide Shut, Alice Harford’s knowing confidence at facing down a man. Both films show the man’s fear of the woman, and in both, his blind insistence shows he doesn’t want to know her, but instead to have her. We don’t usually realize how Kubrick grasps the subtleties of male insecurity, because he is most often flamboyantly heavy-handed when he depicts men behaving badly. But in Lolita, as in Eyes Wide Shut, he is more finely shaded.
The first emergence of Lolita is one of Kubrick’s, and Lyon’s, finest inspirations. The flustered Humbert glimpses her sunbathing and recognizes his mythic nymphet, and then a smile ever-so-slowly dawns on Lolita’s face, not a smile of happiness or excitement, but instead a little cat and mouse, as if she has just dreamed up a winning move. A smile of prediction, really. Sue Lyon plays her first scene perfectly.
With that first sight of Lolita, Kubrick gives her the edge over Humbert, and she keeps it for most of the movie. We don’t often see in Kubrick the desperate, lonely Lolita, shuttled through motels across America in an existence as artificial as a drug addict’s. In the movie Lolita, not Humbert, has the upper hand, as she attracts, manipulates, and finally flees from him.
Kubrick feared depicting Lolita as a victim, probably because our sympathy for Humbert would have drained away. When Humbert tells Lolita about her mother’s death, the screen fades before we see this perplexed twelve-year-old take the news in. Yet Lyon implies her suffering with subtlety: she appears superbly blank and unreadable at times, hinting at what Humbert in the novel calls “that look I cannot exactly describe . . . an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity.”55 Somewhere beneath the surface of Lyon’s performance lurks Lolita the trapped animal, her feelings deliberately dead.
Kubrick’s Lolita is a symphony of emotions, swinging between Humbert’s possessive love and Lolita’s wish to escape him. “Lolita is really like a piece of music, a series of attitudes and emotions that sort of sweep you through the story,” Kubrick told Terry Southern. He used recorded music to get his actors in the right mood on the set, just as he had with Spartacus. Songs from West Side Story sparked Winters’s tears before Humbert, “and she would cry, very quickly, great authentic tears,” Kubrick said to Southern. “And let’s see, yeah, Irma la Douce, that would always floor Mason,” he added.56
Kubrick’s musical choices for Winters and Mason tell us something: his Lolita is less satire than sentiment. The movie mocks American suburban mores, but more significant, it celebrates the myth of romantic love. Kubrick’s Lolita is in fact about love rather than sex. There is nothing particularly sexy about Lyon’s Lolita, attired in a grown-up’s shlumpy nightgown. Instead, Kubrick delivers a straight-ahead love story, with Humbert the jilted party.
James Mason and Sue Lyon in Lolita (Courtesy of Photofest/Warner Bros)
In a letter to Ustinov, Kubrick referred to Lionel Trilling’s essay on the novel, and remarked in Trilling’s vein that “Humbert’s love” is “in the tradition of courtly love: a love that is at once scandalous, masochistic and tortured.” He added that “the story will be told in the subtle style of realistic comedy. But it is a comedy in the way ‘La Ronde’ is a comedy; as ‘Le Plaisir’; as ‘I Vitelloni’ are comedies.”57 Ophüls and Fellini have a free hand with pathos, but their touch is delicate too, and Kubrick follows after them. Lolita is in the end a mélange of comedy, heartbreak, and suspense. It is, too, an American road movie: Kubrick sent a production crew to America to scour the landscape for suitable motels.
Kubrick wasn’t entirely happy with Lolita. He told an interviewer, Jeremy Bernstein, that the movie’s “total lack of eroticism spoiled some of the pleasure of it”—but if it had been erotic, he added, “the film could not have been made.”58 With a sexier Lolita the love story that Trilling saw in the novel would have been more exciting, and the sense of the forbidden pleasurably heightened.
It was a shrewd move for Kubrick to keep eroticism out of Lolita, and so avoid risking the furor ignited by Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll (1956), with the magnetically sexy Carroll Baker beatifically sucking her thumb. Kubrick, who greatly admired Kazan, no doubt had this precedent in mind. Even the unsexy Lolita ran the risk of being condemned as sinful. In May 1961 John Collins of Christian Action expressed his fear that the movie “could lead to rape or even murder.”59 In the end the movie got a C rating—Condemned—from the Catholic Legion of Decency, which meant that Catholics who saw it would be committing a sin. Eliot Hyman of Seven Arts tried to sway the Legion’s Monsignor Little with a hefty contribution, but his morals remained intact.
Nabokov played with sex and morals in a way that Kubrick couldn’t. Nabokov’s novel is erotic only for about a hundred pages, the first third of the book. After that Humbert’s devastation of Lolita’s childhood stains any sexual delight the reader might take in the story. We gradually realize that Nabokov the magician has tricked us by promising the salacious but instead delivering a prolonged moral verdict against Humbert. When Nabokov said that Lolita was purely aesthetic and had “no moral in tow,” he misled us. The novel’s risk-taking pirouettes are half the story. The other is its lethal finger-pointing at Humbert the criminal.
Kubrick couldn’t trap the viewer the way Nabokov trapped the reader, by mixing moral responses with sensual and aesthetic ones. Alex’s antics in A Clockwork Orange excite and disgust the audience at once, but the censorship of 1962 made this kind of double edge impossible for Lolita. Geoffrey Shurlock, who oversaw the Motion Pictures Association’s Production Code, was particularly concerned about the scene where Lolita whispers to Humbert about a game she played with a boy at camp. Kubrick agreed to fade out on her whisper, cutting her next line, “This is how we start.”
Seven Arts made a deal with MGM to distribute Lolita. The film, which cost about two million dollars, grossed four and a half million in its opening run. Because Harris and Kubrick financed the film through a tax-sheltered Swiss company they had set up, Anya Productions (named after Kubrick’s daughter), they reaped a windfall.
The critics liked Lolita. Pauline Kael even said it was the first truly new American comedy since Preston Sturges. Kael had a point. Kubrick makes the mismatch between Sue Lyon and Mason as funn
y as that between Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in Sturges’s The Lady Eve, with Fonda the unworldly nerd felled by Stanwyck’s goddesslike charms. Like Stanwyck’s Eve, Lolita barely has to lift a finger, or a leg, for Humbert to lose his head.
But the reviews missed the movie’s key question about whether a man falls in love with an imagined or a real woman, a concern that will come to maturity nearly forty years later in Eyes Wide Shut. Lolita’s enigmatic, elusive, and illusory nature sneaks up on us gradually. Sitting on the Haze lawn, peering sardonically over her sunglasses, Lolita seems to us nothing more than a slightly plump, sardonic teen, as she gives this boring, obtuse grown-up a dose of her flirtatious contempt. Really, though, she is the cruel fair of courtly poetry, and every bit as unreal. If Lolita is a love story, then, it is also a portrait of delusion, that crucial Kubrick theme.
A week after their daughter Vivian was born in August 1960, the Kubricks went to England for the filming of Lolita, “with two babies and Katharina,” Christiane remembered. “We played rich people on the ship. There were posh cabins, a lot of old ladies using up their pensions.”60 After the shooting ended in March 1961, Kubrick and Christiane went on vacation: a five-day tour of the Normandy battlefields, clearly his idea rather than hers.
In 1962 the Kubricks were back in New York, on Central Park West at 84th Street, with Christiane taking painting and drawing classes every day at the Art Students League. “We went back to New York because we felt we had to,” Christiane said. But she found the city “a lousy place for small children.” She saw “police taking the children to schools. In the shops, roughs would slouch and sprawl across the doorways. . . . The women were harsh too. You just got elbowed out of the way by them.”61